Personal

There are weeks where you do good work and weeks where the way you do work changes permanently. We just had the second kind.

Cousins begin as a fact of childhood. The luckier thing is to keep choosing one another as adults, building a friendship long after family stopped doing the arranging for you.

Most reading is consumption. Rereading is conversation. The book hasn’t changed; you have.

The best family travel does not optimize children out of the experience. It finds a place where everyone wants the same things at the same time. Italy seems to have been built for exactly this.

The calm here is elemental—woven from its geography as much as from its people. There is a profound sense of order in the valleys and along the ridgelines. Nothing is unsightly. Every stone, every roofline seems placed with an unspoken precision.

Horse camp in Kentucky gave our boys more than a week of riding. It gave them an experience large enough to become part of their shared history—one they still return to in conversation.

From Bell Canyon, Sandy spreads out below while the mountains rise behind you. It is a rare arrangement: the conveniences of a real city pressed against the edge of genuine wilderness.

Integrity is priceless, even when expensive. Betrayal—of others or yourself—costs far more.

On my office shelf, a photograph of my father stands watch—silent, unchanging, and, in a way, unknowable. In it, he carries wood planks over his shoulder, his grin a fragment of unselfconscious joy. Behind him, the ski chalet he restored stands like a monument to competence and optimism. It’s the sort of picture that captures a person not as they were in their totality but as they might wish to be remembered—a distillation, free of the messier truths of illness, fatigue, or the gradual erosion of character that time so often imposes.